The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

Inlaid with old English craftsmanship into the Danish teak desk top were four metal switches and coloured lights, BLUE, GREEN, RED and WHITE. The BLUE switch put any calls being made in the building to tap into the phone here. GREEN made a tape of what was being said. WHITE switched any calls made in Dalby’s absence into the tape so that he could play it back next morning. RED was to call every phone in this building simultaneously – no one can remember it being used except once when Dalby shouted for some ink over it.

      I looked up. Alice was standing in the doorway, holding two willow-pattern cups. She wore a floral print dress of the sort favoured by Mrs Khrushchev, heavy nylons and strap shoes. Her hair was almost feminine today but that did nothing to offset the sourness of her white regular features.

      ‘Coffee,’ she said. I didn’t contradict her, but Alice’s fusion of milk, warm water and the coffee powder was like something flushed from a radiator.

      ‘That’s nice of you, Alice,’ I said. ‘You really don’t have to work Sundays, too, do you?’

      Her face screwed into a smile like an old gardening glove. ‘It’s quieter on Sundays, sir – I seem to get more done.’ She set the cups down and looked around the room. It was untidy again and she tutted and straightened up a pile of newspapers, took my raincoat off the chair and hung it behind the door. ‘You’re managing to work the machine now?’ she asked.

      ‘After a fashion,’ I told her. ‘There are still a few things I don’t understand. The selector for the photos for instance.’ I passed her a package of photos with the strip of perforated paper along one side. Alice took the bundle without looking at it, her eyes were level with mine. She said, ‘You are an awful lot too honest for this work. You’d better learn who to confide your weaknesses to before it’s too late.’

      I said nothing, so she said, ‘I’ll go and get my glasses and see if I can make the photo-selector work.’

      Old Alice was getting quite mellow. I wondered if I could ask her to sew up the trousers I had torn at the Barbarossa Club.

      Carswell had spent about a week on S.1’s who had suffered from housebreaking or burglary with an eye to espionage by this means. He was getting very interested in the patterns and needed Murray to help him tie it down. Murray was a bit reluctant to leave his ‘concens’, but they were now finding smaller concens throughout the whole period. What had looked most mysterious in terms of one high point per year could now be seen as a wavy line of varying height. It was just a matter of how far above average was abnormal. As Carswell had most reluctantly agreed, there are also geographical areas which at any one time are abnormally low in S.1’s. He had drawn this up, marking the areas in varying shades of green crosshatched mapping pen lines according to percentage below average. The areas were called evacuations, and the individual S.1’s temporarily out of the areas called ‘evacs’. I am not a statistician but it all struck me as being pretty damn foolish. Carswell wasn’t the type for a legpull, but he was the only person in the building from whom I could take the idea of ‘evacs’ without getting the needle. We had done pretty well by the old man. I just wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t trying to dig himself a niche in the time-honoured army way. I was getting pretty fed up with his housebreaking stats, too, and began to feel that those two were taking me for a ride. I think Carswell could see I was getting fed up with it. On Tuesday I had Carswell in for a drink in the office. He seemed a bit depressed. He had three beers in quick succession and then began to tell me of his childhood in India. His father had insisted upon Carswell going into the regiment. The polo, the pig-sticking, the punitive actions against the tribesmen who enjoyed the fighting as much as the young English aristocrats did, the sun, horses galloping in the open hill country, drinks and mess dinners, the other young subalterns wrecking the mess in horseplay. All these things were things of his father’s life, and when his father died he immediately asked for a posting to another unit. He chose a unit as diametrically opposed to his father’s as he could think of; Indian Army Statistical Office, Calcutta. He had no interest or aptitude for the work. He did it as quiet rebellion against his life until then.

      ‘For perhaps two years the work was pure drudgery; especially since, for a brain as inactive as mine was, the elementary calculations were slow and tedious. But after a little while I got used to the tedium, understanding that these parts of my work were as essential to the arabesques of the final pattern as the rest bars are to a symphony.’

      He was telling me not to be bull-headed in a nice sort of way. Carswell must have been the only officer in the entire British army who had deliberately thrown away a commission in a crack cavalry regiment in exchange for a dreary office job that had left him nudging sixty, a substantive captain, with little or no prospect of a move past substantive major, if that.

      I think we had both been overdoing it from a work point of view. We decided to go home. Through the window I could see the delicatessen crowded with people in wet raincoats. I phoned down for Murray, and asked him if he would like to come up for a drink. My red emergency phone rang before I’d put the internal one down. The operator with the Scotch accent said, ‘CRO calling you, sir. Class four, priority. Please scramble.’

      I pushed the scrambler button and switched in the green switch of the recording apparatus. I heard the operator tell them they were through to me.

      A high-pitched falsetto voice that I had spoken with before said, ‘Hello, Criminal Records Office, Scotland Yard. Military Liaison Officer Captain Keightley speaking.’

      I said, ‘Yes, Keightley?’ I knew my evening by the coal fire with a history book had gone bang.

¹ Name withdrawn from MS.

       11

      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Don’t be surprised if trips to other people’s houses bring whispers of insincerity for you will also discover a new friendship.]

      ‘We’ve had a call from Shoreditch Police Station, sir. Frightfully funny business really.’ All Keightley’s ‘r’s were pronounced like a ‘w’. ‘They have a fellow there. Traffic accident. His car scraped a traffic signal I believe.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So?’

      ‘Well sir, the constable asked him for his licence and so on …’

      ‘Keightley, get to the point please.’

      ‘Well, sir, this johnny in the car. We’ve no record here at the CRO, not a white card that is, but there is a green card for him. You know it’s for suspected persons without a criminal record.’

      ‘Yes, I know that. Tell me, how did you locate his card? Did he give his name?’

      ‘No, sir. That’s just it. You see, this johnny is dressed up in a Metropolitan Police, Chief Inspector’s uniform. Luckily the constable had worked in CRO for a year, recognized him and remembered the face. He thought we had a white card but we only have a green one. It’s endorsed to your department, with one of those star marks for top priority. So I phoned you. What we want to know, sir, is, shall we tell Shoreditch that there is a green card? There may be an Interpol card of course. Do you want him? That’s what I want to know, sir.’

      ‘Listen, Keightley. Tell Shoreditch I want this man held. In fact I want him stripped. I want them to be most careful. Watch for cyanide pills. This could be very important. Tell the chief there that I’m holding him personally responsible for the prisoner’s safety. I want him under lock and key from the minute you finish talking to them, and he’s to be kept under constant observation. Oh, yes, and make sure the constable that brought him in is available – they should make that copper a sergeant on the spot. Pulling in an inspector, indeed: some nerve; and tell them I’m leaving right away. I’ll be there before 7.30.’

      ‘Yes, sir, right away, sir.’

      ‘Oh, and Keightley.’

      ‘Sir?’